Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Here, psychometric methods are employed in conjunction with Null Hypothesis Significance Testing to address a long-standing puzzle: why gaps in subject position are more acceptable than gaps in object position in non-islands, but less acceptable than gaps in object position in islands. Attempts at explaining this asymmetry generally assume it reflects the same constraint that renders gaps after overt complementizers unacceptable -- the "that-trace" effect. There is, however, no a priori reason to believe these two phenomena should be unified. Here, individual differences in sensitivity to the two effects are measured in a psychometric paradigm to demonstrate that they derive from the same underlying constraint.